This week, we take a look at the recently-announced joint venture NikeSkims, including how it may be boosted by the rise of women’s sports and whether it can compete in the crowded women’s activewear space.
Nike has been a dominant player in activewear for decades, but its market share has been slipping in the face of new competitors. Meanwhile, the Kim Kardashian-backed Skims has meteorically risen in the women’s shapewear space. Now, the two titans are joining forces in a bid to conquer the growing market for women’s activewear.
The unexpected announcement came on Tuesday morning. The two companies are joining not for a one-off collaboration or even an ongoing partnership, but rather for a full-on new independent brand called NikeSkims. It will be run as its own company with its own staff, much in the way the Nike-owned Jordan Brand operates semi-independently from its parent company. The new brand will focus on women’s activewear – think gym-ready apparel like leggings, as opposed to Skims’s usual everyday underclothes. The first collection drops this spring.
It’s the first full-on collaboration of its nature between Nike and an outside company in Nike’s history. The question is whether the combined powers of the two megabrands will be enough to unseat other dominant women’s activewear brands.
But the partnership makes sense for both brands. Six-year-old Skims has grown rapidly to be valued at $4 billion but is still a relatively new company with only a handful of stores around the country. Meanwhile, Nike has a massive, global distribution chain and a network of hundreds of stores and retail partners.
“By creating a new brand, rather than simply launching a collaboration, the teams behind NikeSkims created opportunities to significantly expand the brand in the future,” said Maura Regan, president of Licensing International, the trade organization representing the brand licensing industry. “For example, this joint venture can be licensed moving forward, allowing it to reach categories where neither Nike nor Skims have expertise. And while it will benefit from the support of both companies, this brand can evolve separately from Nike and Skims to connect with new consumers.”
That combination of skillsets will be necessary if NikeSkims wants to compete with powerhouses like Lululemon.
“Nike’s expertise in performance engineering and fabric technology, blended with Skims’s understanding of how to accentuate and celebrate the female form, could create an assortment that truly resonates with women,” said Kristen Classi-Zummo, director and apparel industry analyst at Circana. “The joint brand approach effectively feminizes Nike in a way that a limited collaboration couldn’t achieve. While many women feel Lululemon was created specifically for them, this new sub-brand has the opportunity to speak more authentically to women.”
Other experts echoed similar predictions about Nike and Skims’ complementary skills and assets, most notably Skims’s high profile among women consumers for its understanding of appealing feminine silhouettes.
“NikeSkims is entering the market with the best of both worlds: Nike’s technical innovation and Skims’s cult following for understanding fabrics, inclusive fits and, generally, the female form,” said Fallon Ryan, a branding expert and founder of FallonPR. “I think this brand has the potential to be a disruptor, especially if they focus efforts on filling gaps in the market like offering better inclusive sizing, elevating compression without compromising comfort and maybe introducing new seamless performance fabrics.”
The presence of Kim Kardashian as a face of the brand has undeniably helped Skims to grow. She’s featured heavily in Skims’s marketing, and her social media following, with over 350 million followers on Instagram, has already been beneficial to NikeSkims. Her simple post of the logo of the new brand on a lanyard racked up 450,000 likes within 24 hours of posting. It’s unconfirmed if Kardashian will be featured in NikeSkims’s marketing as heavily as she is for Skims. Skims co-founder Jens Grede was unavailable for an interview on the brand’s future plans.
NikeSkims’ competitors are large in their own right. Lululemon brings in over $10 billion a year, while Athleta brings in $1.4 billion, and Fabletics aims to hit $1 billion in the next two years.
The partnership also comes at a time when interest in women’s sports is on the rise. The WNBA, which Skims is already a partner of, had its most-viewed season ever last year. And women’s sports athletes at the college and professional level are becoming household names.
The NikeSkims announcement, released by Nike on Tuesday, makes special note of how NikeSkims will serve the female athlete, including using women-centric insights from Nike’s Sport Research Lab in Oregon and continuing to partner with women’s sports leagues. Women’s sports grew in viewership by 300% between 2021 and 2024, finally breaking the $1 billion mark.
Nike’s competitor, Adidas, has also invested in women’s sports, sponsoring events like this year’s AIG Women’s Open, a major women’s golf tournament, and creating the kits for the 2025 Women’s Euro soccer championship. Ivy Park, Adidas’s women’s-focused active line in partnership with Beyoncé, folded in 2023 after declining sales.
“Nike has always had an unrivaled belief in and commitment to women athletes,” said Amy Montagne, vp and gm of Nike Women’s, in a statement. “No footwear or apparel brand delivers the level of support Nike provides to women’s sport and movement. With NikeSkims, we’re deepening that support, listening to the voices of our athletes and women around the world and meeting their needs with a unique and disruptive point of view rooted in strength and style — and fueled by two powerhouse brands known for innovation and cultural disruption.”
Teemu Suviala, global chief creative officer at the brand consulting firm Landor, said that both companies possess “powerful brand narratives and fiercely loyal customer bases.” That, combined with the proven marketing value that comes from a Kardashian backing your brand, puts NikeSkims in a very good position to compete in a crowded space.
“There are clear strategic advantages for both brands,” Suviala said. “For Nike, this partnership signals an evolving strategy under new leadership, demonstrating a renewed focus on women as a key driver of growth. For Skims, it represents continued expansion, solidifying its position as a major player in the lifestyle space. There’s genuine synergy, and groundbreaking ideas often emerge when seemingly unrelated concepts, ideas and even brands converge.”
Stat of the week
70%: The percentage of all incoming customer inquiries to GoodwillFinds that are now handled by AI, according to the company’s CEO, Matt Kaness.
GoodwillFinds, the online thrift store, offers tens of thousands of products on its site every day. That’s required a heavy investment in AI to help sort through all the product listings. GoodwillFinds’ in-house AI agent, which the company calls Gem, was built in two months and introduced this past December.
News to know
- Forever 21, after being rescued from bankruptcy by Authentic Brands Group and its Sparc Group joint venture with Simon Property Group, is back in the danger zone. The company nears a second bankruptcy and will likely close hundreds of stores in the coming weeks.
- The E.U. is getting closer to implementing a waste tax that would require producers of products like apparel and food to contribute financially to the waste collection of their own products. It’s part of a long-running effort by European lawmakers to make companies take more responsibility for what happens to their products after they’re sold.
- Swatch Group reported a difficult 2024, with profits falling 75%. Part of the cause of the drastic decline was a drop in sales in China and Southeast Asia, where revenue was down by 30% last year.
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